The advent of inexpensive 3D printers has revolutionized the way people are designing. By simplifying the fabrication process, it is possible for anyone using a CAD system to produce articles in a wide variety of materials including felt and fabric. While the felt and the fabric printer represent a great improvement compared to the traditional hand assembly of fabric patches, fabric printers are still very slow and it is not unusual for all but the simplest models to take several hours to print. This limits the scope of design exploration that can be achieved within in a regular workday.
3D printing techniques using pre-manufactured sheets of material are based on a Cartesian layer stacking approach in which the object is built by piling up layers of material on top of each other. This approach is simple to implement but is lacking in speed because it is an inherently discrete process. In contrast, the fastest 2D printing systems use a continuous process, and existing label cutting machines can print and cut labels at a rate in excess of 100 meters/min using a gonio head to drive a cutting laser.
Although an increasing number of materials have become available for 3D printing soft objects, they cannot offer the rich textures of materials like felt or fabric. In an effort to bridge this gap, other systems fabricate 3D objects with needle felted yarn or print complex 3D geometries using a stack of fabric sheets. These approaches, as well as other layer-based printers are slow because of a discrete printing process.
Reducing the cycle time between an idea and its physical instantiation is advantageous for improving the design process because it allows users to explore more ideas in a given time frame. Towards that aim, low-fidelity prototyping has been proposed. This sort of approach trades accuracy of representation for speed, a common trade-off in other areas of design, such as interface design where paper mock-ups are a common part of the early design cycle. To date, such fast, low-fidelity prototypes are not available for fabric printing, and recent breakthroughs in the printing speed for hard or rubber-like models (e.g., faster resin curing, or use of prefabricated voxels) are not suitable for printing soft fabric objects.
Therefore, what is needed is an improved 3D printer.